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Tomel
join:2007-11-07
Midlothian, VA

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Re: [IMG] New Quantum IMG Build - 3.24.2 (1/26/15)


BranchS . . .

I don't disagree with you that FiOS is the best of the bunch (at least in my area based on others I know who use other providers). That's why I'm only considering two alternatives - cutting back on my FiOS package to save a few bucks or cutting the cord altogether. I certainly don't want to trade one problem, which is fixable with a re-boot, for more serious problems that are outside my direct control.
Acct101
Premium Member
join:2011-09-20
Bensalem, PA

Acct101 to Tomel

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to Tomel
I am in the same boat as wanting to cut back my services. Over the holiday I must have gotten a little too jolly and signed up for the half season NBA and NHL packages and my cable bills for the past couple months have been $400.

The chord cutting is appealing except it's hard to get the rest of family on board. One thing I've been reading is the 20 some generation are chord cutters so maybe that will lead to better cheaper packages for the rest of us.
bsangs
join:2002-08-21
Montclair, NJ

bsangs

Member

Don't be putting silly words in my mouth boys, I never said anything about cord cutting. They'll have to pry the cord from my cold dead hands when the time comes. Only at this rate, it won't be a FiOS cord, it'll be a DirecTV dish.
wyatte47
join:2008-03-02
Tampa, FL

wyatte47 to Acct101

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to Acct101
said by Acct101:

For the first time I had this issue tonight when I came home from work, my wife was watching something and I rewinded it ten minutes back to see the beginning then I grabbed my plate, sat down and watched it for a few minutes and all of a sudden the show flipped and went to the current spot in programming.

This to me is the most annoying bug right now! The random jump to the end of buffered viewing. I wonder how long before it's fixed?
Acct101
Premium Member
join:2011-09-20
Bensalem, PA

Acct101

Premium Member

I rebooted everything this afternoon and that seemed to correct everything.

For now....
bushleaguer
join:2007-01-22
Gillette, NJ

bushleaguer to Tomel

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to Tomel
said by Tomel:

bushleaguer . . .

My reboot of router, server and client seems to have fixed (at least temporarily) the hesitation problem as well as the lag. FYI.

Thanks Tomel.
bushleaguer

bushleaguer to bsangs

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to bsangs
said by bsangs:

People, you need to start speaking with your wallets instead of on message boards. That's what I did. Done with FiOS TV. Think about how much money we keep pouring into an inferior product, about which we keep saying "Well, it will be fixed shortly." And yet every fix brings more and more issues and no financial compensation for us. It's obvious they aren't listening to our posts, our calls, or our e-mails. I for one am done being treated like the weakest guy in the prison shower.

I agree. Unfortunately, I looked into Comcast last year when I was going though other issues and Comcast offered less for more $$. What's more, Comcast's customer service reputation is worse than Verizon's so that was that. Unfortunately my neighbors have trees in the way of the area where I could point a dish (if that weren't the case, I would have switched months ago).

Tomel
join:2007-11-07
Midlothian, VA

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I've explored other alternatives and don't really have any viable option other than cutting the cord (which I'm exploring, but really don't want to do). Other alternatives are more expensive, more problematic, or not possible where I live.

The suggestion to talk with our wallets is absolutely correct but the problem with that suggestion is numbers. How many individuals have posted to this and other forums complaining about the Quantum TV problems? 10? 50? 100? From Verizon's viewpoint, that's a drop in the bucket. The impact on Verizon's bottom line would be insignificant even if all of us dropped FiOS and went with another provider.

What needs to happen is the problems some of us are experiencing need to somehow get reported in the popular press. Big bad corporation Verizon rolling out a defective product and ignoring the pleas of their customers. Can anybody here make that happen? I'll bet that would cause Verizon to refocus their efforts from Quantum "enhancements" to Quantum "fixes."

Want to bet that Comcast is jumping through hoops internally trying to figure out how to address their Customer Service problems since their recent PR nightmare.
bushleaguer
join:2007-01-22
Gillette, NJ

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Well, a middle ground option would be to go back to the 7232s until they fix the problems. I looked into that (I called) months ago and was told that once you are a quantum customer you cannot go back to the older DVRs. Someone noted that that was nonsense but I couldn't put the order through via Verizon so I don't know what is right. Someone else mentioned just bringing the quantum equipment down to a Verizon store and asking for the 7232 setup...maybe that would work.
bsangs
join:2002-08-21
Montclair, NJ

bsangs

Member

said by bushleaguer:

Someone else mentioned just bringing the quantum equipment down to a Verizon store and asking for the 7232 setup...maybe that would work.

I'm that someone. I did that and it worked without an issue. (I've since dumped the 7232s however, as regressing back to two tuners was a painful experience.)
dharel1705
join:2009-06-09
Merrick, NY

dharel1705

Member

said by bsangs:

I'm that someone. I did that and it worked without an issue. (I've since dumped the 7232s however, as regressing back to two tuners was a painful experience.)

You got lucky. I tried to downgrade both over the phone and in store. Verizon will not downgrade a customer once on Quantum equipment. They will simply make a software change to limit the Quantum boxes to the feature set of the older boxes.
bsangs
join:2002-08-21
Montclair, NJ

bsangs

Member

said by dharel1705:

said by bsangs:

I'm that someone. I did that and it worked without an issue. (I've since dumped the 7232s however, as regressing back to two tuners was a painful experience.)

You got lucky. I tried to downgrade both over the phone and in store. Verizon will not downgrade a customer once on Quantum equipment. They will simply make a software change to limit the Quantum boxes to the feature set of the older boxes.

Did you actually bring your disconnected equipment with you? And they said no?
dharel1705
join:2009-06-09
Merrick, NY

dharel1705

Member

said by bsangs:

said by dharel1705:

said by bsangs:

I'm that someone. I did that and it worked without an issue. (I've since dumped the 7232s however, as regressing back to two tuners was a painful experience.)

You got lucky. I tried to downgrade both over the phone and in store. Verizon will not downgrade a customer once on Quantum equipment. They will simply make a software change to limit the Quantum boxes to the feature set of the older boxes.

Did you actually bring your disconnected equipment with you? And they said no?

I did. It was when I last had issues with one of my client boxes. Phone support reserved a new IPC for me at my nearest store. I took all my Quantum boxes with me, hoping that I could just swap back to my old DVR setup. The store refused to swap, saying it was against policy to downgrade a customer with Quantum hardware. I then called customer service, and was told the same.
Acct101
Premium Member
join:2011-09-20
Bensalem, PA

Acct101

Premium Member

Why is it against policy to downgrade boxes? So you essentially have to terminate your contract to downgrade?

I could see if the cost were the same, but they are not. You should always have the option to downgrade to save money.

Tomel
join:2007-11-07
Midlothian, VA

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Acct101 . . .

From what I've read in this thread, you ARE permitted to downgrade. However, the downgrade is apparently done programmatically through software rather than switching the hardware.
bsangs
join:2002-08-21
Montclair, NJ

bsangs

Member

Unless you take the nuclear option - as I have - and downgrade to FiOS Locals only. That way you return all your equipment. If you want to upgrade again, get the equipment you want (7232s) instead of being stuck with the VMS equipment. Admittedly, that is a much easier option if you have a local FiOS store.
Acct101
Premium Member
join:2011-09-20
Bensalem, PA

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So complicated!

I wish I could downgrade to the old A/B switch and have no boxes at all and pay $19.99 a month,
chitchatjf
join:2008-07-13
Lawrence, MA

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Two tuners is fine with me.
OTOH I live alone.

FTBoomer
join:2011-04-22
Tampa, FL

FTBoomer to SeattleMatt

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Seriously disappointed with the performance after about 45 days. Lag, skipping and various other issues already discussed here. Rebooting the media server and clients at least weekly.

Tonight watching The Oscars (don't judge) I wanted to skip through the BS so I set the channel and after coming back from dinner I set the 8x reverse for about 10 minutes and started the show. After a few minutes, the show jumped to LIVE. I was pissed and ran the rewind again. Once again after an unspecified period of minutes, the media center jumped the show to LIVE. After several times of this frustrating back and forth I finally gave up and watched the show LIVE.

Thoughts?
Timothy28
join:2006-05-13
Lewisville, TX

Timothy28

Member

It's a known bug in the new build.
JPL
Premium Member
join:2007-04-04
Downingtown, PA

JPL to FTBoomer

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At that point I would have just hit record, gone into the play list and play from the beginning. But you're right, you shouldn't have to do that. The one issue that's been driving me batty - and it's only on some channels, and only when I'm watching live - is the skip back issue. You watch for a few minute and then the picture jumps back a second or two. Makes watching a movie really frustrating.
bsangs
join:2002-08-21
Montclair, NJ

bsangs to SeattleMatt

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I think what humors me most about this is that they actually delayed this update from its original date so that they could fix some allegedly show-stopping bug. And people here were like, "Well that's great, I'd rather wait until they had all the bugs worked out!" Keep waiting folks.
JAH_PGH
join:2009-09-28
Pittsburgh, PA

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to FTBoomer
said by FTBoomer:

Seriously disappointed with the performance after about 45 days. Lag, skipping and various other issues already discussed here. Rebooting the media server and clients at least weekly.

Tonight watching The Oscars (don't judge) I wanted to skip through the BS so I set the channel and after coming back from dinner I set the 8x reverse for about 10 minutes and started the show. After a few minutes, the show jumped to LIVE. I was pissed and ran the rewind again. Once again after an unspecified period of minutes, the media center jumped the show to LIVE. After several times of this frustrating back and forth I finally gave up and watched the show LIVE.

Thoughts?

I'm not judging you

The issue you speak of has been one since the inception of Quantum, possibly before that. I always record the program and watch something else for 20 min or so, then go to the DVR and start watching from the beginning. I'm always very gentle with the SKIP's too. It seems like if you hit SKIP too many times or in quick succession, it will jump to live TV. I've done this with The Walking Dead the entire season and haven't had any issues.
dharel1705
join:2009-06-09
Merrick, NY

dharel1705 to bsangs

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said by bsangs:

I think what humors me most about this is that they actually delayed this update from its original date so that they could fix some allegedly show-stopping bug. And people here were like, "Well that's great, I'd rather wait until they had all the bugs worked out!" Keep waiting folks.

Humorous indeed!!

I've said it before, and others have disagreed, but Quantum was released too soon. Again, this is just my opinion. If Verizon knew an update to the older 7232 boxes was going to be released, Quantum should have been fully tested with matching software (yes, I realize it's different hardware and code base) and released when the functionality was the same. I jumped at the chance to get Quantum, because of the increased number of tuners and recording capacity. Had I known Quantum would be plagued with these issues, I would never have switched. My parents still have an older setup, with the newer software, and don't have any of the weird bugs/issues we're all seeing with Quantum. Lastly, we're all paying a premium for what's supposed to be Verizon's top tier service, but it hardly seems like we're getting that.
JPL
Premium Member
join:2007-04-04
Downingtown, PA

JPL

Premium Member

Don't take this the wrong way, but how do you know it wasn't adequately tested? I know, it sounds obvious - because it's not performing the way it should. Here's the problem with that assessment, though - sometimes issues materialize not because of flaws with the structure of the code, per se, but because of scaling. You run isolated tests on a system, which doesn't really exercise it, and you get a sense that under a very slight load whether it'll work or not. But then you roll that out to a couple hundred thousand customers - you scale it up - and all of a sudden what was workable isn't.

Sometimes it's a matter of just bad design. This is (not to get political here) what plagued the rollout of healthcare.gov. Bad design that didn't lend itself to scalability.

Is that what we're seeing here? I don't know. I don't think so. The big problem in all of this comes down to one question: short of rolling out s/w to your customer base, how do you test scalability?

Again, this isn't an easy question to answer. You can simulate it, which is what many of these shops do, but you still really don't know until the s/w gets out the door for real (your simulation is only as good as the assumptions that go into it, and even then, there's only so much you can test). In fact, if Verizon has jumped on the agile bandwagon, then their testing will be very much like Google's - your customers become your testers. I don't think that's Verizon's culture, to be honest.

So, why are these problems plaguing only the VMS and not the other hardware? It's not just because of the fact that they're using HTML 5 for VMS. I get the sense that much of the functionality for the VMS is remote. You get some of this with the older hardware (when you search on Verizon's guide, you're not really searching on the guide - you search remotely), but I sense that with the VMS there's a whole lot more of that. I think that's what's causing the scalability issue we're seeing. And I do think that's what we're talking about here. When they first rolled out this update to VH08 we saw none of these issues. Everything was snappy. When they started rolling it out to the entire footprint, that's when these problems started surfacing.

I know it sounds like I'm just trying to give Verizon a pass here. I'm not. I just have a lot of experience working on large-scale s/w systems, and they are far more complicated than everyone is led to believe. I also know that there's no substitution for just rolling the s/w out the door for determining how it'll really perform.

One other thing with all this - and not to pick on you, bsangs, but anyone who thinks that this is specific to Verizon has a very short or selective memory. All of these systems undergo issues. I don't care which platform your talking about - it's just that we tend to get to a point where they end up fixing the system, and everyone gets selective amnesia over the issues that plagued their system that had them pulling their hair out.
bsangs
join:2002-08-21
Montclair, NJ

bsangs

Member

said by JPL:

One other thing with all this - and not to pick on you, bsangs, but anyone who thinks that this is specific to Verizon has a very short or selective memory. All of these systems undergo issues. I don't care which platform your talking about - it's just that we tend to get to a point where they end up fixing the system, and everyone gets selective amnesia over the issues that plagued their system that had them pulling their hair out.

Bully. I like to call this "The Microsoft Effect." Think about it. We've been conditioned to accept bug-ridden products for which we pay since the Windows 95 era. It's only gotten worse. And I know this isn't specific to Verizon, but this is a Verizon forum. Doesn't seem like the appropriate place to rip into Comcast for its X1 issues.
JPL
Premium Member
join:2007-04-04
Downingtown, PA

JPL

Premium Member

Yeah, I agree that we should be highlighting Verizon issues in a Verizon forum, but the tenor of your post was that Verizon is selectively bad at this. They're not. With every new platform I've had, I've had issues that made me want to test the acceleration of gravity on said device. The first DVR I had was a DirecTV TiVo unit and that sucker used to freeze worse than my car doors this past winter. And it would take a full 15 minutes for it to be rebooted.

Then I moved to their R15 DVRs which had lovely limitations like only allowing 100 series being defined, or would slow to an utter crawl when the device got north of 90% full. And it also had this issue where it would get phantom phone calls in. They couldn't get caller ID working right. It drove me so batty (I would get a pop up of phone calls that weren't coming in every, oh, 5 minutes or so) that I just unplugged the phone line. They never did fix that issue.

The earliest Verizon DVR I had had their original firmware (prior to the IMG) and it would occasionally give me a lovely strobe effect, which required rebooting, or severe static on channel changes, which required rebooting.

Point is, I can go through the litany of frustrating bugs with every stinking platform I've ever used. Not just DVRs, but all consumer electronics.
webcobbler
join:2013-03-09
Rumson, NJ

webcobbler to Timothy28

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Has anyone needed to reboot since last Monday/Tuesday?

Some people "lost" the parenthesis in a reboot last week. Then gained it back within 24-48 hours.

I ask because I need to reboot again today, and I am not sure if the (3242.5) will stay, or not, this time.

Or will I lose it, and 24-48 hours it will get that update.

If anyone has experienced this, can you please let me know.

For example: last week they lost the parenthesis, then gained it back. With another reboot a few days later, they did not lose it.

Thank You

johnf2
VHO8
Premium Member
join:2001-12-31
Feasterville Trevose, PA

johnf2

Premium Member

said by webcobbler:

I need to reboot again today, and I am not sure if the (3242.5) will stay, or not, this time.

Yes, rebooted last night, both VMS, the UI (3242.5) is still there.

johnf2
webcobbler
join:2013-03-09
Rumson, NJ

webcobbler

Member

johnf2,

I did reboot.

I do have the 32.42.5 in parenthesis, this time. That is good.